Ana María Durán Calisto
Ana María Durán Calisto is a designer, planner and scholar from Quito, Ecuador. In 2002, she co-founded Estudio A0 with Jaskran Kalirai. The firm’s work has been widely recognized: Estudio A0 won the SDSN-Amazon Prize at COP21 in Paris and its work has been featured in the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, and in many other exhibitions. Durán Calisto has taught research seminars and design studios at many institutions before coming to Yale including the at the Catholic University of Ecuador, Harvard University, Pratt Institute, Columbia University, the University of Michigan, the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, the Catholic University of Temuco, and at UCLA. In 2022, Durán Calisto received the Mark Cousins Theory Award for her work on extractivism and the built environment and her interest in the principles of ancestral urban ecologies. She has co-edited the books Ecological Urbanism in Latin America (2019), Beyond Petropolis: Designing a Practical Utopia in Nueva Loja (2015), and IV Taller Internacional de Vivienda Popular (2007). She has contributed chapters to the books Adaptive Reuse in Latin America: Cultural Identity, Values and Memory (2023), Roadside Picnics (2022), A Line in the Andes (2014), Modernism and Contemporary Art in Latin America (2014), Extreme Urbanism 1 (2011), Restructuring from Within (2007), and Thinking Practice (2007). She co-authored the Toward Re-Entanglement: A Charter for the City and the Earth (Bauhaus Earth, 2022). She curated the 15th Panamerican Architecture Biennial of Quito: Visible Cities (2006) and was National Curator for the IX BIAU. Durán Calisto is a member of the Science Panel for the Amazon, convened by SDSN and the United Nations, and co-authored its report chapter on urbanization. She completed a Loeb Fellowship on the infrastructural integration of South America. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the urban planning department at UCLA. Under the advice of Susanna Hecht, she is writing a dissertation on the urban history of Amazonia, with a focus on indigenous systems of territorial planning and colonial disruptions.